Coping With Floods Is Only Half the Battle for Mumbai’s Poor

An especially heavy storm lashed Mumbai on Tuesday, leaving mud and debris in the city’s poorest areas. Credit Atul Loke for The New York Times

MUMBAI, India — For many of the poor in this city, each year contains just two seasons: the demolition season and the rain.

Every winter, when Mumbai is dry, the police come with wrecking crews and rip down countless slum homes.

And every summer, when the monsoon hits, many of these same areas get flooded. Filthy water, swirling with oil stains, rushes into houses and sweeps away the few possessions, leaving behind plastic bottles, coconut husks, rocks, sticks and bundles of rags.

Flooding in Mumbai on Tuesday. Epic floods are part of life in the city, which sits on a peninsula surrounded by the sea. Credit Punit Paranjpe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On Tuesday night, an especially heavy storm lashed Mumbai. The Dhurves, a family of four that lives in a plastic-roofed shelter squeezed between an overpass and a set of railroad tracks, raced to a highway median — high ground — where they spent the night watching their home get swamped for the umpteenth time.

“My life will go away, fine,” Babli Dhurve said on Wednesday as she sat on an old mattress, staring at her neighbors scooping up storm muck. “But what about my children?”

Here in India’s financial capital, epic floods are part of the landscape. This megacity of 18 million sits on a peninsula surrounded by the sea. Many of its sewers and drains were built more than 80 years ago, when Mumbai was a small fraction of its current size. In 2005, in this same area, more than 1,000 people died during the monsoon season.

A family found high ground on a road divider. Credit Atul Loke for The New York Times

The rains on Tuesday were bad — estimated to be more than 10 inches in 12 hours — but nowhere near the deluge of 2005. The authorities said at least five people died, including one doctor walking home from work who was sucked down an open manhole. By Wednesday, the city snapped back to normal. Traffic flowed down the mud-streaked boulevards and cleanup crews sawed apart downed trees. Parts of the city still smelled fishy, though, possibly from a tidal surge that mixed with the rainwater and submerged entire streets.

As is often the case when real disaster strikes, people seemed to band together. A light rain falling, two men zoomed across a bridge on a small motorcycle, the passenger wearing a yellow plastic rain jacket and the driver wearing yellow plastic pants, apparently from one set they had divided into two.

In the Dhurve family’s neighborhood, many women stepped out of their homes to help clean, wearing gowns in oranges, pinks and sapphire blues — the bright colors an almost cruel contrast to the drab surroundings they inhabit. Their houses are plastic lean-tos, dozens in a row, built on a dirty sidewalk.

Suraj and Babli Dhurve with their chldren in their shelter in Mumbai. Every summer when the monsoon hits, the family’s home is flooded. Credit Atul Loke for The New York Times

“We don’t even have a dream of where we would go,” said Suraj Dhurve, the father.

Mr. Dhurve is a dishwasher, as are many of his neighbors. The neighborhood is, in essence, a dishwashers’ colony, although people here phrase it a little differently, saying they work in the catering business.

A new monorail runs above the road. Fancy cars swoosh past. But for this group of about 50 interconnected families, Mumbai’s opulence and opportunities seem out of reach.

Most of the adults are illiterate. Families of six survive on $10 a week. Their homes are considered illegal, and when the weather is good, the police and demolition crews show up.

A ritual being performed on a Mumbai beach on Wednesday, a day after it was postponed by heavy rain. Credit Atul Loke for The New York Times

Nobody in the colony on Wednesday was talking about the flooding half a world away in Houston, or even seemed aware of it. But the comparison has not escaped Indian intellectuals, including those in the news business.

“India’s Houston” was the headline one news site used for a Mumbai flood story. Another paper ran side-by-side photos of the floods in each place.

After news agencies reported that a curfew had been imposed in Houston to stop looting, many Indians posted proud Twitter messages saying nothing of the sort was happening in Mumbai, even in the poorest parts.

“Here in Mumbai,” wrote Anand Mahindra, a well-known executive, “a friend stuck in a car to the airport for 5 hrs told me that slum dwellers came out to serve stranded people tea & biscuits.”

Nobody was serving tea or biscuits in the Dhurve family’s neighborhood. At the same time, as the brooms scratched the pavement and people wrung out wet clothes, there was little complaining.